A Letter from Bill Weaver

“The Truth May Set You Free, but It Isn't Free to Produce”

By Bill Weaver

September 30, 2005

Dear Reader:

The truth may set you free, but it isn’t free to produce. Indeed, telling the truth costs money, labor, and misery. Sometimes it costs even more than that. Authentic journalism has at its base the delivery of truth to all who care to look. Authenticity, another word for the real, for the truth, is the only goal of Narco News. But telling the truth is as risky a business as one can be engaged in, and people are killed all the time for telling the truth, or trying to tell the truth.

Whenever people of power look into nature they see themselves looking back; they see that they are anointed with the real, that they have a truth gene inside them that naturally gives them power over others. The implication or assertion by those “below” them that the truth they see is merely a reflection of self-absorbed know-nothings brings down hell on earth. Thurman Arnold, a United States legal scholar, once said that in order for a heaven to work it cannot be too close to earth. What Narco News does is bring the “heaven” of power nearer to earth; it shows that “heaven” to be a lust of conceit. But hooking onto the “heaven” of oppressors and dragging it down to the real of the suffering, impoverished, and oppressed takes many hands and sufficient money to make the truth available to all.

Therefore, we ask for money. Not for ourselves, not for our pet politics, not to advance a petty agenda, but to maintain a community of mutual support for the endeavor of telling the truth. Gary Webb, an authentic journalist of the highest ability, committed suicide partially perhaps because of the loneliness of being a truth teller. Money allows us to keep the community of Narco News going, it allows truth tellers to gather and commune and commiserate and celebrate and roar at the unjust together rather than separately as lonely animals. Give what you can to keep truth alive; give what you can to help keep our community thriving; give what you can to help yourself and those you care about.